I sure as hell never had a wolf.
“Why are you following me?” I ask him as I open the doors that lead to the balcony.
I don’t expect the wolf to answer me, but somehow, I sense his response.
Protection.
I stop and look down at him. He cranes his neck to meet my gaze.
“Did you just talk to me?”
His long, bushy tail wags behind him.
“This is the strangest morning I’ve had yet in Neverland and I was once chained to a bed.”
I go down the steps and the wolf follows and then he keeps following me as I cross the backyard.
We stop at the end of the dirt path when I spot Peter Pan on the sandy shoreline facing the ocean where the sun is just starting to cast a ribbon of fire on the horizon line.
I look down at the wolf. “Time to go,” I tell him.
No, he says back.
“I’m talking to a wolf,” I mutter. “Maybe I’m dead.” Then, “If you’re here for protection, I am no safer with you than I am with Peter Pan.”
The wolf blinks up at me.
“Go on,” I tell him again. “I need this moment alone with him.”
And then we both turn our attention to Pan, to the line of his back against the glowing ocean waves.
Fine. The wolf trots off into the underbrush and I go down to the shoreline.
When I come around to stand between Pan and the lapping ocean waves, I find his eyes closed, his arms around his knees. “Sit,” he orders me.
There is a faint spark of something in the center of my chest that feels like a knowing that should have a name, but doesn’t.
Like I’ve walked into a city I’ve never visited but yet somehow know where all the roads lead.
“He’s hovering,” Pan says, his eyes still closed. “I can feel him everywhere, even on you.”
It takes me a second to realize he means the wolf.
In the line of ferns and palm fronds on the edge of the beach, there is a flash of black fur.
“He said he’d give us some privacy.”
Pan peeks at me with one eye. “You’re talking to wolves now, are you?”
I shrug. “It would seem so.”
“Sit, Darling.”
I cross my legs and sit. He’s warm beside me, just like the wolf, and there is a new energy surrounding him that I swear I can feel vibrating on my skin.
Everything is buzzing and for some reason, I feel like I’m not entirely in my own skin.
“You got your shadow,” I say.
“I did.”
“And how do you feel?”
A breath escapes him through his nose and then he bows his head. “I thought I would feel relief. I do feel relief. But…” He pops his head back up and squints at the horizon line.
“But what?”
“Once you know you can lose something, it’s hard to dismiss the fear that you could lose it again.”
I understand him, in a way. It wasn’t that long ago that I was terrified of losing my mind.
But power is another thing. And I can’t help but think about the conversation I had with Vane about the mighty oak. I had convinced myself I was the oak tree, resilient and determined, but knowing these powerful men, I realize I can barely understand the concept of power.
I am the tree with a bent and twisted trunk, trying to stretch herself to better light, so fragile that in every storm, her boughs creak and her roots cling to the earth praying it’s enough to keep her in the ground.
The bare minimum is all I know.
I have never been powerful.
I lean into Pan and hook my arm through his, rest my head on his shoulder and try to convince him that I know a thing or two about any of this. “This time will be different.”
“You sound so sure.”
“I am. There’s no Tinkerbell now.”
He tsks. “Yes but there is soon to be a Crocodile.”
“I’m sure Vane can help us deal with his brother.”
Pan nods.
We turn our attention to the ocean and the brightening morning sky. Shades of pink and lavender and yellow and orange burst across the thin, wispy clouds. A flock of seagulls fly past.
Somewhere nearby, I can hear a ticking.
“What’s that sound?”
Pan frowns. “What do you mean?”
“Like a clock.”
He gives me a suspicious look, and then leans back and digs into his pocket and produces a pocket watch without a chain. “This?”
The ticking is louder now that it has nothing to shield it. I take the timepiece and turn it over in my hand to find delicate filigree engraved on the front side and script writing on the back.